Quantitive trading approach still reigns in hedge funds

Quantitative hedge funds took some big hits in all the market turmoil. To some, this discredited the quant approach. The computer-driven trading models all seemed the same. They ended up with way too similar portfolios, and they dragged each other down. The truth is, there is very often a human element involved in the operation of quant models. There could always be a live person overriding decisions and manually making other ones. But to the quant faithful, human interaction is not the solution. The preferred route would be to improve the algorithms, notes a CFA Institute survey. And that is exactly what a lot of hedge funds seem to be bent on doing. They would like to add differentiating data inputs. But is there such data available that will lead to differentiated performance for very long?  

For more:
- here's the survey

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